1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to gaming machines and, more particularly, a gaming machine and related programs wherein input operations per se has gaming characteristics.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, research and development work has heretofore been undertaken to provide gaming machines, such as slot machines and computer-games for home use/arcade game use. These gaming machines, which are widely used in general practice, include a controller, composed of various buttons, which is programmed such that when a player operates the controller, characters on a display device achieve desired operations.
Further, another gaming machine has been developed which has a display device configured to allow a player to directly touch the display device and a detected player touched position whereby enabling various operations to be performed depending on the touched position (as disclosed, for instance, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-939 (on paragraphs [0054] to [0061] and in FIGS. 7 to 12).
With the gaming machine set forth above, a contact sensor, such as a touch panel, is attached onto a front surface of the screen. Such a contact sensor detects a position, at which the player has touched.
Examples of a contact position detection system with such a touch panel include an electrostatic capacity type method, which measures electric potentials at electrodes located at four corners of a touch panel (as disclosed, for instance, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2001-507148), and an electrostatic capacitory coupling method that measures a flow rate of electric current at the four corners of the touch panel (as disclosed, for instance, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2000-250710).
However, with the gaming machines set forth above, the operations to be executed upon manipulations of the player to directly touch the screen are made for the games to be progressed. Thus, no remarkable difference exists with respect to input operations activated by a normally used keyboard and game pad and the input operations per se have no gaming characteristic.
Further, the related art gaming machine is configured to allow the inputting on the touch panel such that one input like an input conducted by one hand of the player is allocated to one reaction and one process to cause restriction in variations in the input with the touch panel, resulting in limitation in an attempt to allow the input per se to have an interesting and entertaining capabilities.